I tested it a bit in a VM to get familiar with pacman and yay. Latest KDE Plasma 6 and more snaps in Ubuntu’s future are the main reasons I want to switch.
As I don’t use a separate home partition, I have an extra drive with BackInTime home dir backups and virtnbdbackup snapshots.
Is EndeavourOS stable enough for everyday use and would restoring home with BackInTime just work (as root user)?
Not specific advice, but make sure all the programs you use are available and where/how you will get them.
The AUR is the second-biggest software repository in the world
What’s the biggest?
nixpkgs (unstable to be precise, but iirc all channels are bigger than the AUR)
Interesting! How did Nix get such a large repo despite being younger than AUR? (I’m not super familiar with Nix)
Nix has been around for over 20 years, and a lot of nerds volunteered to make it better.
Nixos not being fhs compliant is a most likely also a big factor. Before you could emulate FHS you couldn’t use language specific PMs like npm, and instead were forced to build those packages with nix. So now it’s filled with packages that other distros wouldn’t ever add. Even worse, I’ve seen python libraries have separate packages for different python minor versions.
The Arch USER Repository is is essentially only used for packages that aren’t in the official repos. It’s not a good comparison, as nixpkgs is the official one.
You may want to double check Debian… Stable has 120k packages, unstable 213k.
According to Repology, Debian Unstable has ~40k, the AUR has ~90k, and nixpkgs unstable has almost 110k.
Where did you get those huge numbers from?
From the Debian allpackages.txt file which can be downloaded from each branch’s page.
https://packages.debian.org/stable/allpackages?format=txt.gz
https://packages.debian.org/unstable/allpackages?format=txt.gz
Nixpkgs
Depends how you count it. Debian has between 120-200k apt packages pre-compiled for it on the various branches, making it the absolute largest overall in terms of readily-available packages.
If you count by source packages then it’s either Arch’s AUR with 85k or NixOS with 80k. But I’m not sure about these figures because both these repos have a low bar of entry and not all packages in there will work.